Review of Lawrence Durrell's "Justine" (Volume I of "The Alexandria Quartet")

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Due to my anal retentiveness and insistence on finishing most everything I start, I’m sometimes not as ambitious when it comes to picking up really big books. “Justine” isn’t itself that large, but it is just the first volume in a 1,000-page tetralogy. And it’s spectacular.

It reads as an odd mélange of “A Sheltering Sky” mixed with the strongly internal character development of writers like Woolf and Proust. As in “A Sheltering Sky,” the most important character isn’t a person at all, but a place. Alexandria, along with haunting presence of its patron saint and poet Constantine Cafavy, wholly perfuse the novel. The writing took me some time to get used to given its highly experimental, lyric form. At first, Durrell’s style certainly seems histrionic and overly wrought, like something embarrassing out of a soap opera. It, much like the city itself, eventually starts to grow on you. Sometime during the second half, I came to see Durrell’s prose as not lurid and purple, but almost epiphanic. 

There is an epigram of Freud opening the novel that says, “I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that.” This, in a word, sums up much of the novel. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout, befriends a tubercular Alexandrine prostitute named Melissa, but begins an affair with a woman named Justine, who is already married to the wealthy Coptic Christian Nessim. The attempt to hide the affair and Nessim’s growing suspicion and jealousy are what drive the novel. (It wasn’t by accident that I used the words “soap opera” above.) Durrell seems to want Alexandria to be as obscurantist and full the “Other” as possible: he puts several of the main characters in a philosophical-religious cabal, but at the end its influence and importance hasn’t been revealed.

What makes this novel truly spectacular is the language, the episodic jumps in time, the lush lyricism, and how Durrell so deftly manages to tie this all into both the city of Alexandria and the themes of passion, love, and jealousy. I’ll leave you with just a few lines from the very end, just to entice: 

“The cicadas are throbbing in the great plains, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines – so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them – I mean a black pitch, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings…”